You Spin Me Right Round, Baby

So, more about spinning, as requested by Amy.

A lathe is a machine that spins stuff very quickly. Is that too simplistic a place to start? My father has all kinds of wooden shapes he has created (and some he inherited from his mentor, Doug Shenstone), called chucks. They are either hanging on the wall behind the lathe, or piled up on shelves beside that area.

The lathe and chucks hanging behind it.

More chucks!

This is how they are organized: my dad sometimes remembers where he put the one he wants. He does, thankfully, write what each one is for on the chuck itself. Once I can actually read his handwriting, that will be very helpful. (Okay, to be fair, he’s started labelling each one legibly now, just for me!)

To spin something, we afix the correct chuck to one end of the lathe, puts a smaller wooden piece on the other end and tighten a metal disc between the two.

Here’s a plate-shaped chuck:

Here’s the resulting plate, partially planished. My dad did this. I’m not at this point yet.

We grease the metal with beeswax (which, as a bonus, smells nice) and then use either a metal or wooden spinning tool to push the metal into the shape of the chuck.

In the above photo, my father is using a metal spinning tool in his right hand to push the pewter against the chuck. The wooden stick in his left hand is used to provide counter-pressure and stop the metal from warping. The tricky part with spinning is to press hard enough to move the metal, but not so hard that gets too thin and snaps, or that it starts warping.

Here’s a successfully spun cup and an unsuccessfully spun one with a tear in the metal where it got too thin. Below is an even bigger fail, where the lathe likely wasn’t tight enough and the metal disc became uncentered. Both of these are my screw-ups, in case that isn’t glaringly obvious. The dark streaks are grease.

Here’s a photo of my father half-way though spinning the same type of cup successfully. At this point, he no longer needs the stick in his left hand for counter-pressure and just moves the spinning tool back and forth to move the metal.

Once the pewter is in the shape of the chuck, we trim it with a chisel.

That can be fun because it sometimes causes pewter streamers to fly everywhere, resulting in whomever is spinning looking a bit like a christmas tree with tinsel hanging everywhere.

Pewter trimmings hanging off the lathe

So, them’s the basics. The basics are all I’ve gotten anywhere near mastering. My father does far more complicated things I have not yet tackled, like using multiple chucks to produce vases with thin necks. And, the bigger the piece of metal, the harder it is to spin, so I’m still only successful with the smaller stuff. 

‘Signing’ Your Work

For centuries, pewtersmiths (and other metal smiths) have used touchmarks as a method of identifying their work. Each smith designs and creates a unique stamp. After cutting out the necessary shape out of a sheet of pewter, my father uses a hammer to strike the stamp into what will become the bottom of whatever he is creating.

His touchmark is his initials – CAH – with crossed hammers and the word ‘pewter’. (Edit – Okay, my father objected to this line because they aren’t exactly crossed hammers. They are a mallet and gad. Here is the explanation from his website: “These are the guild symbol of the miners and smelters dating from the 13th century, and still used by present-day miners and metalurgists. These tools are similar in appearance to the hammers used in pewtersmithing.” I knew this, of course, because I’ve read his website, but the journalist in me figured whatever, no one knows what a gad is anyway and they look like two hammers … never trust journalists.)

His mentor, Doug Shenstone, used the stylized initials ‘Sh’ for ‘Shenstone’ and then had another stamp that said ‘pewter’ and a third that said, ‘Canada’.

When Doug died, my father placed the stamp with his initials in Doug’s pocket before he was buried. He then began to add Doug’s ‘Canada’ to his own touchmark, so you can tell if my father has made something before or after 1992 based on whether that appears on the piece.

My father’s stamp isn’t quite even, however, and requires two hammer strikes to ensure the entire thing is stamped into the metal properly. When I worked for him while I was in university, I never really mastered it, resulting in the ‘H’ not appearing, or the  touchmark appearing in double. My father sometimes doesn’t get it perfect either, but if you have some of his older work, particularly a smaller piece, and the touchmark is only half there, it is quite possible that it was actually something I produced.

See? No H,and not much of an A either. When stuff like this happens, my father and I say to eachother, “Well, that’s how they’ll know it is handmade.”

I am better at it now, but marginally.

When I started the first tzedakah box I made, my father pointed out that, as I designed and was creating the box myself, it didn’t make any sense to use his touchmark and suggested I sign it myself. But how?

Some of the stuff I produced 20 years ago I signed myself, such as a lamp I made as a friend’s wedding gift, and a wine goblet I made for myself. I used a rotary tool to crudely engrave my name and the year in the bottom. But my handwriting is atrocious under the best of circumstances, and engraving with a drill bit is not the best of circumstances.

1989! I guess I should be saying, “Almost 25 years ago.” Sigh.

This is a fairly standard way – My father has a teapot Doug made before developing his own touchmark and he did a nice job of signing it (that says 1933, by the way). But at this point, I don’t want my work to look as though a 12-year-old has signed it, so I was reticent to go this route.

The letters and ‘pewter’ stamp, plus scraps where I played around with my options.

It turns out that Doug also had stamps for every letter in the alphabet, so my father dug those up and I stamped my name into the bottom, and added Doug’s ‘pewter’ below it. It isn’t satisfactory as a permanent answer. I will need to figure out my own design. But it works for now. Does anyone have any good ideas about a more permanent mark?

Getting started

I’ve been working with my dad for several weeks now. I started out making something he calls tube candleholders, which hold tealight candles. These are shaped by cutting rectangles of pewter out of a large sheet and then using a rubber mallet to beat them into the correct shape around a metal stake – something very cathartic for a person dealing with marital difficulties!

The next step is to weld the seam together. I remember being bad at welding 20 years ago. I’m still bad at welding. Fortunately, the step after that is to file down the seam until the metal is smooth, so my lumps all disappeared. Then, I planished them. Planishing involves placing the pewter against a very smooth metal stake and then hammering it with a smooth-headed hammer for a dimpled finish. The shape of the stake differs depending on what is being fashioned. I like these candleholders because the the  planishing is relatively easy. If you are planishing something cup-shaped, you must hit exactly the right spot or instead of an attractive dimple, you will dent it out of shape. But these candleholders are planished on the same metal rod they are shaped around, so it is pretty much impossible to hit the pewter in the wrong spot.

I have ADD, which means I have very little patience for boredom. Generally, anything that forces me to just sit and think drives me crazy with frustration. Attempting meditation of any sort has always been a complete failure for me. I can’t even comprehend how people can find it relaxing. But to me, planishing feels like I imagine mediation is meant to be. It requires just enough concentration – on where to hit next, on keeping the pewter and hammer clean of any debris – to stop me from really thinking about anything else. I find it very relaxing.

I took a crappy photo of my finished product:

Here is a better photo of my father’s version of the same thing:

(You can see the his other candleholders on his website, by the way.)

Next, I tried to make a few quiaches (Scottish drinking vessel). It was my first kick at spinning again, and I kind of messed up the first one I tried to spin on the lathe, causing the surface to ripple rather than be completely smooth. But that is the brilliance behind planishing. It was invented to hide all the imperfections created when shaping a bowl, and it works. There were some spots I had to go over a few times, though, to work out the dents I created making mistakes.

No longer any good for a quaich, I transformed my small bowl into a porringer when I soldered on a handle my father cast. Soldering is the standard method of attaching handles or bases. I am much better at soldering than welding. I like soldering.

The final product is a one-of-a-kind piece in my father’s catalogue, as he doesn’t planish his porringers.

How to Become a Pewtersmith

Since the Middle Ages, people learned trades such as metal smithing through an apprenticeship. An apprentice was taken on by a master craftsman, usually working for years for nothing more than room and board in exchange for being taught the trade. Doug Shenstone, who taught my father how to pewter, learned his craft this way. After apprenticing, the next step is becoming a journeyman for several years. Finally, the journeyman creates a significant piece meant to showcase his (usually, pewtersmiths were men, but there have always been exceptions) skill, and presents it to the master. If the ‘master piece’ is accepted, the apprentice himself becomes a master.

Doug Shenstone went through this process in the 1930s in Ontario, becoming Canada’s only native-born master pewtersmith. The scarcity of metal after WWII drove him into a more traditional job with the government, but eventually he made his way back to pewtersmithing, working after hours in his shop in Ottawa.

Doug Shenstone in his workshop.

My father’s path was very different. He always had a workshop in the basement and puttered around there in his spare time (he was a metallurgical engineer with the government during the day). The hobbies he tried out that I remember were: oil painting, batik, candle-making (he insisted we hand over broken crayons to use for colour), wood-working and copper enamelling. Then one day, he went out to Shenstone’s workshop to buy a pair of wine goblets for my mother for their anniversary in 1976. Enthralled by what he saw there, he convinced a reluctant Shenstone, who was already in his 60s, to teach him how to pewter.

Colin Hamer in his workshop

Obviously, with a full-time job and young family to look after, there was no question of a true apprenticeship. The concept doesn’t fit with the modern world. My father visited Doug’s shop for lessons after work. Doug had no children and he and my father became close friends. They showed their work in shows together, with Doug’s contribution growing smaller as he aged. When he died at the age of 82 in 1992, he left his equipement and tools to my father, who uses much of it in his workshop.

For years, my father worked in a small workshop in our suburban basement. Machines such as the buffer and lathe are very noisy, and I remember that when it was dinnertime, often one of us kids would walk into the dining room above the workshop and jump on the floor so the vibrations would let my father know it was time to stop. That was where he first began to teach me how to pewter, when I was home from university during summers. Just over 15 years ago, he built himself a proper workshop in the back yard. It is a bigger space, but we still trip over each other in there. Of course, it doesn’t help that my father is a pack-rat. For example, here’s his dizzying array of files.

I think about 5 of them are really useable. Well, maybe 4 – in my opinion his roughest file really could be replaced. With the rest, my father picks them up one after another and says, “Nope, not that one, nope that’s not good, nope, nope …” and then puts them back. I’m starting to get good at recognizing the good ones, though.